Quotes About Language

Por eso yo digo aquí tantas palabrotas, porque están devaluadas, porque ya nada vale nada, hay demasiada gente, todo perdió su efecto , la palabra se ha vaciado de sentido y explota como una pompa de jabón

Si me entienden? ¿O estoy tan viejo que ya no me entienden?

Pero sangriento fin de semana en Medellín no es pleonasmo? Ya ni sé, con el deterioro ambiental y moral se nos deterioró hasta la gramática. ¡Dizque Bogotá la Atenas sudamericana! ¡Dizque éste un país cuidadoso del idioma!

Yo, por ejemplo, nunca uso el verbo «escuchar», que significa oír con atención. ¿Y por qué? Porque no me gusta, porque no lo necesito, porque está de moda. A mí con «oír» me basta porque me sirve tanto para un trueno como para un discurso. Si el presidente escucha un trueno, yo lo oigo. El presidente es un atropellador del idioma, un ignorante, un abusivo, un vivo: yo ya estoy muerto.

El idioma está tan indefenso como los animales. Todos los atropellan con impunidad. Y esas dos causas perdidas son las que he tomado como mías, por el gusto de perder. El éxito es para los granujas. Y si no, pásenles revista a los presidentuchos actuales de América a ver si encuentran entre ellos a un señor.

Porque yo con este idioma hago lo que se me dé mi real gana.

La palabra se inventó para mentir, en ella no cabe la verdad. El hombre es un mentiroso nato y la realidad no se puede apresar con palabras, así como un río no se puede apresar con las manos. El río fluye y se va, y nosotros con él.

y he aquí otro ejemplo de lo hiperbólico que se nos ha vuelto el idioma en manos de los periodistas ¿una masacre de cuatro? Eso es puro desinflamiento semántico…

It was the words that seemed to dislodge my most secret feelings.

I wonder why you can always read a doctor's bill and you can never read his prescription.

I wondher why ye can always read a doctor's bill an' ye niver can read his purscription.

But th' best thing about a little judicyous swearin' is that it keeps th' temper. 'Twas intinded as a compromise between runnin' away an' fightin'. Befure it was invinted they was on'y th' two ways out iv an argymint.

Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer's and the reader's fall.16 As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations.

I'd have thought any man might consider himself very fortunate to be loved by a lady who spoke the language of goddesses and could find her way amongst the stars.

She'd always been comforted by how many words there were in the English language -- more than a million. With so many words surely anything could be said, everything could be understood. But what did the volume of words matter in any language when she couldn't even manage to ask the simplest questions? Will you tell me your story? Will you let me in to my own family? Isn't it my story, too?

Asking my father to ask the waitress the definition of "sloppy Joe" or "Tater Tots" was no problem. His translations, however, were highly suspect.

In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language

That's just like the manual says," said Witherwax. "If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time." "You mean with no homonyms?" said Doc Brenner. Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. "Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?" ("Gin Comes In Bottles")

But one does have to give words some credit. One has to at least pretend that they more or less resemble their meaning. Their shady meaning.

Unlike a computer or a brain, Wiener observed, the channels of communication in society were formed, not from wires or neural nets, but from the exchange of information between individuals using language and nonverbal communication, from learning and group communication in families and larger social organizations, and from the exchange of knowledge and experience among people of different cultures. Drawing

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

By your words ye are justified and by your words ye are condemned.

A fervent young admirer exclaimed: "By Jove, the Good Soldier is the finest novel in the English language!" whereupon my friend John Rodker, who has always had a properly tempered admiration for my work, remarked in his clear, slow drawl: "Ah, yes. It is, but you have left out a word. It is the finest French novel in the English language!"

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